Theoretically, companies charge you additional fees to offset costs of your more expensive choices. Or, to discourage or encourage certain behaviors. Ticketmaster, as usual, has a different idea. They charge you $2.50 for you to print your own ticket at home, and $0.00 to have them mail it to you. That’s a headscratcher, until you realize people printing their tickets at home are often last-minute people and if you’re in a rush you’re more likely to agree to additional fees if it gets the job done. [via Reddit] (Thanks to Bargaineering!)[More]

Tonight at 7:30 Eastern the third and final installment in the “United Breaks Guitars” music trilogy hits the streets in a live webcast release party. As you wait for that latest hot joint, relive the magic and catch up on the story of the country singer who watched in horror from their airplane as baggage handlers tossed around his Taylor guitar on the tarmac and broke it, by watching the first two videos: [More]

Do you marvel at the ridiculous products in the SkyMall catalog? Musician Nina Katchadourian does, and she has written a song about them, viewed through the lens of the cats featured within its pages. The SkyMall Kitties. [More]

Ticketmaster has settled with the FTC over charges that it used “deceptive bait-and-switch” tactics when selling concert tickets, reports the Los Angeles Times. As usual for this kind of settlement, Ticketmaster admits no wrongdoing. For instance, the FTC noted that in one case “the same set of 38 tickets for the Springsteen concert in Washington were sold and resold 1,600 times,” and Ticketmaster waited as long as three months to let affected customers know, which is a clear example of not doing anything wrong. [More]

If record labels decided to pull some of their songs from the Zune Pass service in the past couple of weeks, they did a poor job telling Microsoft about it. The company seems to be as in the dark as Zune Pass subscribers about why songs, albums, or entire discographies have gone missing. Ars technica reports that a Microsoft employee wrote on a Zune forum, “We are investigating your reported missing albums indicated in this post—and will come back to you as soon as we understand why they’re missing.” [More]

After a McDonald’s microsite licensed one of Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand’s without their direct approval, as record labels are wont to do, singer for the group Alex Kapranos tweeted some infelicitous words about the fast food joint. Specifically, “Dirty bastards. Stupid arrogant motherf***ing pig-brained arseholes. I’d rather eat a cowpat on a bun than a bloody McDonalds.” I dunno, Alex, have you tried their new Angus burgers? They’re pretty tasty and they come with a big slice of fresh onion. [@alkapranos via NME via Eater] [More]

Matthew sent us this page from today’s Best Buy advertising flyer. They’re offering an amazing deal this week–buy a CD from certain Interscope musicians, and you can download Tweetdeck for iPhone absolutely free. Which would be a very nice deal if Tweetdeck weren’t already free. [More]

Lala, the music streaming/backup service that’s also a reasonably priced mp3 store, has been purchased by Apple. Does this mean Apple may introduce some sort of streaming service in the future? On Lala, you can pay 10 cents per song to stream it as much as you want, or $.99-1.29 to own it outright. At any rate, if you buy from Lala now, you’re buying from Apple. [More]

Since the Beatles are notorious for refusing to release their music online, the mere fact that BlueBeat.com was selling them was kind of strange, which probably explains why EMI just sued them for copyright infringement. But BlueBeat has come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation. The songs aren’t really Beatles songs, you see, but “psycho-acoustic simulations” and therefore original works.

The new music search capabilities that Google introduced today will make it easier to quickly find a song you can’t remember the name of, or sample some tracks from an artist you’re interested in. But it’s not so much a new service as a more efficient combination of a bunch of services already scattered around the web.

One of the weirder strategies by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) recently has been to claim that every time a ringtone played, a royalty should be paid. ASCAP sued AT&T earlier this year over the claim, but a federal judge has ruled that your phone ringing does not constitute a public performance.